Competition Music!

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

My little sister

Gosh I hate blogger sometimes!! I had written up a whole post, and then tried to copy/paste it, and now it refuses to paste! AARGH!!!

Anyways, the point of todays post is to showcase my sisters artwork. She's doing her BA fine arts, specialising in sculpture. Today she has to exhibit all of her works from the whole year to be marked. I'm not entirely sure how one goes about marking an artwork, but anyway...

So here are the results. I'm rather impressed with it all! If you happen to be at Wits today, I'm sure she'd be chuffed to have you waddle through and 'Ooo!' and 'Aah!' at it... ;)

For this piece, their directive was to do something for a full 24 hrs. So what did my sister choose? FRENCH KNITTING!!! Of all things to do...The amazing thing about this piece is that it really does preserve the 24 hours in a tangible way; she used different coloured bits of wool for each hour, so the result is a long woolen sausage made of multiple coloured bands, each a chronicle of that hour. She can even point out at which points she fell asleep...The wool on the wall is the response piece to her knitting. The class had to respond to her work and so she got them to unravel tangled wool (the same colours as the piece itself) for an hour. The total that they unraveled was wound up into a wool ball and laid at the floor of each tangle.

For this piece, she made casts of her feet in plaster. The moulding and casting process was loads of fun! We got to play around with the awesome silicon-rubber moulding stuff! It's bright purple and requires that you mix two chemicals together; one bright blue, the other bright pink. Very 5 year old birthday party, just without the screaming children and the nausea from eating too many sweets and potato chips. She then poured resin over the feet to represent the washing of feet (mirroring the story in the bible of Jesus' feet being washed). I'm not entirely sure what the significance of this all was, but it looks cool and we got to play around with some awesome chemicals!

My personal favourite: The tree of the knowledge of good and evil. For this my sister took a real tree (or at least, part of one...) and coated it in aluminium foil. The leaves were all hand-made by her and the rest of us. We then helped her attach them to the branch. The idea, apart from the fact that she just likes foil (as you will see later), is that the tree itself reflects the observer. It's also a dynamic piece as the reflections are constantly changing, depending on where you stand around it. I asked her if I could have this one, but she'd promised it to someone already...

Her last piece, and her favourite, is a statue of St. Lucia, again, coated in aluminium foil. My sister's name is Lucia, so this might be why she likes this one so much...Surrounding the piece are hundreds of origami lillies, also made of foil. We were all recruited to make those too. They are not easy to make at all! Folding foil like that is a mission! But, with the help of the extended family and a few friends, it got done.

Just to confirm, my sister is in fact fascinated by religious iconography, so that's why the themes for most of these are of biblical/religious origin.

I'm no Christian... but weren't Jesus Christs feet washed with perfume? I don't recall any resin in the story (or was it perfumed resin...).

Also i just realised that they changed the name of our little northern coastal town to IsiMangaliso from St Lucia. This must be a sign, you will probably take up art and overshadow your sister at some point in time.